The African savanna area: giraffes, zebras, rhinos and antelopes, sentence 5

A giraffe's tongue is about 45 to 50 centimetres long and dark blue-black; it pulls leaves off thorny acacias, thick sticky spit protects it from thorns, and the dark colour may help against sunburn.

Who acts: tongue, thick sticky spit, dark colour · What happens: be, pull, protect, help · To what, where: leaves, thorny acacias, tongue

This is a sentence of the lesson «The African savanna area: giraffes, zebras, rhinos and antelopes» of the biology course of Mova's primary school. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (tongue, thick sticky spit, dark colour), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

The tree

The words, one row each (CoNLL-U)

#	word	lemma	UPOS	features	head	relation
1	A	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	2 giraffe	det
2	giraffe	giraffe	NOUN	Number=Sing	4 tongue	nmod:poss
3	's	's	PART	_	2 giraffe	case
4	tongue	tongue	NOUN	Number=Sing	11 long	nsubj
5	is	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	11 long	cop
6	about	about	ADV	_	7 45	advmod
7	45	45	NUM	NumForm=Digit NumType=Card	10 centimetres	nummod
8	to	to	ADP	_	9 50	case
9	50	50	NUM	NumForm=Digit NumType=Card	7 45	nmod
10	centimetres	centimetre	NOUN	Number=Plur	11 long	obl:unmarked
11	long	long	ADJ	Degree=Pos	root	root
12	and	and	CCONJ	_	16 black	cc
13	dark	dark	ADJ	Degree=Pos	16 black	amod
14	blue	blue	ADJ	Degree=Pos	16 black	amod
15	-	-	PUNCT	_	14 blue	punct
16	black	black	ADJ	Degree=Pos	11 long	conj
17	;	;	PUNCT	_	19 pulls	punct
18	it	it	PRON	Case=Nom Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	19 pulls	nsubj
19	pulls	pull	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	11 long	parataxis
20	leaves	leaf	NOUN	Number=Plur	19 pulls	obj
21	off	off	ADP	_	23 acacias	case
22	thorny	thorny	ADJ	Degree=Pos	23 acacias	amod
23	acacias	acacia	NOUN	Number=Plur	20 leaves	nmod
24	,	,	PUNCT	_	28 protects	punct
25	thick	thick	ADJ	Degree=Pos	27 spit	amod
26	sticky	sticky	ADJ	Degree=Pos	27 spit	amod
27	spit	spit	NOUN	Number=Sing	28 protects	nsubj
28	protects	protect	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	19 pulls	parataxis
29	it	it	PRON	Case=Acc Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	28 protects	obj
30	from	from	ADP	_	31 thorns	case
31	thorns	thorn	NOUN	Number=Plur	28 protects	obl
32	,	,	PUNCT	_	38 help	punct
33	and	and	CCONJ	_	38 help	cc
34	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	36 colour	det
35	dark	dark	ADJ	Degree=Pos	36 colour	amod
36	colour	colour	NOUN	Number=Sing	38 help	nsubj
37	may	may	AUX	VerbForm=Fin	38 help	aux
38	help	help	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	28 protects	conj
39	against	against	ADP	_	40 sunburn	case
40	sunburn	sunburn	NOUN	Number=Sing	38 help	obl
41	.	.	PUNCT	_	11 long	punct

Pragmatics

No stored speech act for this sentence.

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	where	other	roles by
1	is	present	a giraffe's tongue			45 centimetres obl:unmarked; long property	tree rules
2	be		a giraffe's tongue not said here				tree rules
3	pull	present	tongue	leaves	thorny acacias		vn carry-11.4 «NP V NP PP.initial_location»: agent=Agent leaf=Theme off acacia=Initial_Location
4	protect	present	thick sticky spit	tongue		from thorns	vn defend-72.3 «NP V NP PP.theme»: agent=Agent it=Beneficiary from thorn=Theme
5	help	may	the dark colour			against sunburn	vn help-72.1-1-1 «NP V PP.theme»: agent=Agent

One row per clause the reader finds. «not said here»: a role filled from the clause above. «roles by»: a VerbNet class and frame when one fits the verb, else the reader's rules on the tree.

Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0, as the whole of Mova corpus 0.4, of which this treebank (the agreed school, mova-school-agreed-en.conllu) is part. The lessons were written for Mova's primary school. Sentence school:biology:101-the-african-savanna-area-giraffes-zebras-rhinos.lesson:5.

The tree: Mova annot: Rust (en) → Haiku 5.5 (medium, Batches API) patches; gates UD 2.18; agreed by treeagree rules (Stanza, Trankit, spaCy trf): no change. The frames are read from the tree by Mova's frames reader (prag) when this page is built, the lesson read in order, so a pronoun may be resolved from an earlier sentence.

See the release 0.4.

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/101-the-african-savanna-area-giraffes-zebras-rhinos/5/